Free Writing Home by Alan Bennett Page A

awful conditions, and the winds come straigh off Ilkley Moor …
    GUEST: And all I say is a lot of things grow jolly well on it.
    GUEST: But you do grow everything?
    GUEST: I usually come on the second day; I always think it’s rather a nice day to come.
    GUEST: Yes.
    GUEST: … that’s what I’ve been saying: let’s walk today …
    GUEST: Did you?
    GUEST: Yes I did.
    GUEST: I’m so glad, because you can do the Valley Gardens, which are lovely, and then have a Pinewood walk, then come to our seventy acres.
    GUEST: Have a cup of tea or something and there you are …
    GUEST: Yes.
    GUEST: No, I liked Australia better than New Zealand simply because New Zealand’s more like Europe …
    My parents never went to – still less gave – a cocktail party. The education they always regretted not having would have had cocktails on the syllabus, and small talk, and the ability to converse, and the necessary accomplishment of saying things one doesn’t mean.
    GUEST: … yesterday we thought, ‘Oh gosh, we’re in for an absolute soaking.’
    GUEST: I know – pouring at home when we came up …
    GUEST: Our timing was pretty good …
    GUEST: I say he could …
    GUEST: Hello, Max. How are you?
    GUEST: Very well, thanks.
    GUEST: Good.
    GUEST: Do you know the Mayoress?
    GUEST: No, we haven’t been introduced yet.
    ( Lobby .)
    The real solvent of class distinction is a proper measure of self-esteem, a kind of unselfconsciousness. Some people are at ease with themselves so the world is at ease with them. My parents thought this kind of ease was produced by education: ‘Your Dad and me can’t mix; we’ve not been educated.’ They didn’t see that what disqualified them was temperament, just as, though educated up to the hilt, it disqualifies me. What keeps us in our place is embarrassment.
    GUEST: Mind you, it’s getting to the stage where it takes a bit more out of you every year, doesn’t it?
    GUEST: That’s right.
    ( Ballroom .)
    Not that there’s much embarrassment in the ballroom, where the road hauliers’ wives are also having a do. Less refined theseladies – some of them (dare one say?) a little common – but jollier by a long chalk. What do they talk about? Youth? Trysts in long-gone transport cafés, marriages that began in lay-bys, or even in a long tailback on the M6?
    How at seventeen and soaked to the skin, one stood for hours at the Wakefield turn-off when suddenly Mr Right, ferrying a load of minced morsels from Rochdale to Penzance, slowed his juggernaut to a halt beside her and now they’ve got a fleet of six and a son at catering college and she’s having her lunch in Harrogate?
    ( Brontë Room ,)
    The Mayor of Harrogate has collared the Brontë Room this lunch-time to entertain his fellow mayors. The party includes a French delegation and the Mayor of Harrogate’s twin town, Luchon.
    FRENCH MAYOR: ( A long speech in French .)
    LADY GUEST: Ye-es.
    FRENCH MAYOR: ( More French .)
    LADY GUEST: … that’s right, yes. ( Laughs .)
    FRENCH MAYOR: ( Still more French .)
    LADY GUEST: Well, I’m very glad you came.
    Oh! Charlotte and Emily – nothing has changed. A Mr Heathcliff is calling you from a Haworth call-box and wishes you to pay for the call.
    ( Lobby. Guests arriving for a wedding reception .)
    Mr and Mrs M. C. Dakin request the pleasure of your company on the occasion of the marriage of their daughter Susan Margaret with Dr Robert Frederick Logan at St John the Divine Parish Church, Menston, on Saturday 23 April 1988 at 4 p.m. and afterwards at the Crown Hotel, Harrogate.

    ( Champagne poured into two glass slippers .)
    The slippers are a bit of tradition invented by the hotel. ‘Do you want the slippers and champagne? People seem to like them. It’s a little touch that we do – makes it a bit classier.’ Do they go in the dishwasher now, the slippers – difficult, one would have thought, to get a tea towel into the toes.
    ( Corridor, outside the ladies’ loo .)
    GUEST: Yours is round the